Microsoft's European Nemesis

When Thomas Vinje went to Brussels in 1989, he planned to stay for just one year. He’s still there. And while much about the European Union’s capital has changed, Vinje’s goal has not. He has spent much of the last 18 years battling Microsoft Corporation’s market dominance on behalf of some of the software giant’s toughest U.S. competitors.

To tell the truth, there seems to be some karma at work in the fight Vinje has picked. Though he speaks Norwegian, German, and conversational French, and is married to a Spanish woman, Vinje is a native of the Seattle area who grew up in Kirkland, Washington, not far from Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond. What’s more, Vinje’s career has intersected at several points with that of Brad Smith, now Microsoft’s general counsel. They briefly overlapped as students at Columbia Law School, from which both were graduated. After law school, Smith was also an American in Europe, studying international law in Geneva, and working for Covington & Burling in London and for Microsoft in Paris, then managing the company’s European Law and Corporate Affairs group.